HPV vaccine narratives on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic: a social network, thematic, and sentiment analysis

Jean-Christophe Boucher; So Youn Kim; Geneviève Jessiman-Perreault; Jack Edwards; Henry Smith; Nicole Frenette; Abbas Badami; Lisa Allen Scott

doi:10.1186/s12889-023-15615-w

HPV vaccine narratives on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic: a social network, thematic, and sentiment analysis

BMC Public Health. 2023 Apr 14;23(1):694. doi: 10.1186/s12889-023-15615-w.

Authors

Jean-Christophe Boucher¹, So Youn Kim², Geneviève Jessiman-Perreault³, Jack Edwards², Henry Smith², Nicole Frenette³, Abbas Badami², Lisa Allen Scott³

Affiliations

¹ School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, 906 8th Avenue S.W. 5th Floor, Calgary, AB, T2P 1H9, Canada. jc.boucher@ucalgary.ca.
² School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, 906 8th Avenue S.W. 5th Floor, Calgary, AB, T2P 1H9, Canada.
³ Provincial Population and Public Health, Alberta Health Services, Holy Cross Centre, 2210 2 St SW, Calgary, AB, T2S 3C3, Canada.

Abstract

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has increased online interactions and the spread of misinformation. Some researchers anticipate benefits stemming from improved public awareness of the value of vaccines while others worry concerns around vaccine development and public health mandates may have damaged public trust. There is a need to understand whether the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine development, and vaccine mandates have influenced HPV vaccine attitudes and sentiments to inform health communication strategies.

Methods: We collected 596,987 global English-language tweets from January 2019-May 2021 using Twitter's Academic Research Product track. We determined vaccine confident and hesitant networks discussing HPV immunization using social network analysis. Then, we used a neural network approach to natural language processing to measure narratives and sentiment pertaining to HPV immunization.

Results: Most of the tweets in the vaccine hesitant network were negative in tone (54.9%) and focused on safety concerns surrounding the HPV vaccine while most of the tweets in the vaccine confident network were neutral (51.6%) and emphasized the health benefits of vaccination. Growth in negative sentiment among the vaccine hesitant network corresponded with legislative efforts in the State of New York to mandate HPV vaccination for public school students in 2019 and the WHO declaration of COVID-19 as a Global Health Emergency in 2020. In the vaccine confident network, the number of tweets concerning the HPV vaccine decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic but in both vaccine hesitant and confident networks, the sentiments, and themes of tweets about HPV vaccine were unchanged.

Conclusions: Although we did not observe a difference in narratives or sentiments surrounding the HPV vaccine during the COVID-19 pandemic, we observed a decreased focus on the HPV vaccine among vaccine confident groups. As routine vaccine catch-up programs restart, there is a need to invest in health communication online to raise awareness about the benefits and safety of the HPV vaccine.

Keywords: COVID-19; HPV vaccine; Social Network Analysis; Social media; Twitter.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

COVID-19* / prevention & control
Health Communication*
Humans
Pandemics / prevention & control
Papillomavirus Infections* / prevention & control
Papillomavirus Vaccines*
Sentiment Analysis
Social Media*
Social Networking

Substances

Papillomavirus Vaccines